But doesn't that itself make a very interesting point in that case, even if it's not necessarily the one you were trying to make? That if you want to argue that Royal Knights is nonetheless still nostalgia pandering, that's fine. But even if so "Royal Knights nostalgia pandering" would be more equivalent to something, like, say pandering to fans of Gen 3 in Pokémon or something, Idk, because the point is that the Royal Knights as such, along with most of the members themselves, were not a concept from the beginning of Digimon or anything (with the Royal Knights as a concept really taking off around the time of stuff like the X-Evolution movie and Digimon Frontier, Omegamon aside). And indeed, if series like Digimon can pander to nostalgia by focusing on stuff like the Royal Knights, which don't exactly have much to do with the origins of the series, if you can nostalgia-pander from random points in the series like that like Digimon does via stuff like the Royal Knights... that makes the case that Game Freak and Pokémon itself could almost certainly do the same thing, and not everything has to be Gen 1 pandering, that other stuff would work just as well, so..
